On the day after the election, I met a 70-something woman near the Front Royal, Virginia coffee shop that is my second office. Connie had always taken her news from corporate broadcasting and was a lifelong Democrat. Now she might be described as a “deplorable” by some of our politicians and media personalities.

This year brought a sea change. Connie turned off the television and followed the election race online, and for the first time in her life voted Republican. That shift upset some family and friends, but the reason she voted for Donald Trump was illuminating. “I finally realized how much the news slants stuff or just outright lies,” she said. “Once I caught on, I saw them doing it all the time.”

Lots of Americans apparently agree. In one online article at Mediaite, Alex Griffing reported that left-of-center MSNBC and CNN saw their ratings crater in the days following the elections. For primetime, “they shed 30 percent and 54 percent of their viewers, respectively, compared to the same day last year.” From post-election Wednesday through Friday, Fox News averaged 4.4 million viewers nightly, while MSNBC only attracted an audience of 808,000, with CNN following with 611,000.

Before the election, when Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos refused to allow the paper to endorse a candidate, all hell broke loose both on the Post staff and throughout the media. In his response via an opinion piece at the Post, “The hard truth: Americans don’t trust the news media,” Bezos wrote,

“We must be accurate, and we must be believed to be accurate. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but we are failing on the second requirement. Most people believe the media is biased. Anyone who doesn’t see this is paying scant attention to reality, and those who fight reality lose. Reality is an undefeated champion.”

Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong also turned a thumbs down on any endorsement of presidential candidates. After the election, he took another giant step and dumped his paper’s editorial board, tweeting “When the President has won the vote of the majority of Americans then ALL voices must be heard. Opinions are just that. I will work towards making our paper fair and balanced so that all voices are heard….”

That the staff at both papers responded with outrage to these announcements reveals the truth of what Bezos wrote. They really aren’t paying attention to reality, that reality which ties their jobs and their paychecks to the size of their readership. Their failure to do so indicates an immaturity that further undermines their credibility.

The problems go well beyond the outlets mentioned above. An October 2024 Gallup poll revealed that “the news media is the least trusted group among 10 U.S. civic and political institutions involved in the democratic process.” It’s more than safe to say that this trust has taken yet another blow with the 2024 election and its aftermath.

It’s a simple truism that trust once lost takes time and effort to restore. To regain their reputation, the media will require both. Here are a few suggestions about how to begin that recovery.

First, put out the word immediately to schools of journalism and the Ivy Leagues that your organization isn’t interested in hiring graduates with fervent political biases, particularly those on the left. Old-fashioned common sense is now back in style.

Stop paying enormous salaries for a name. Fox News journalist Laura Ingraham hauls in $15 million a year. Gayle King of CBS takes home $11 million. Jake Tapper of CNN pockets $13 million annually. Rachel Maddow of MSNBC tops all these highflyers with an estimated salary of $30 million.

Meanwhile, the average U.S. news anchor’s salary is just $65,500. In short, there’s a battalion of anchors out there who would work for peanuts to make it onto national news. Start scouting around and hire some talent who won’t bleed your organization dry.

Save the moralizing for the editorial page. Cut the adjectives, the one-sided takes, and the name-calling from the real news. To the editorial page or television commentary add a point-counterpoint section, as was done on 60 Minutes decades ago. If you need a refresher course on balance in media, visit and study the variety of stories posted at RealClear Politics online.

Pursue the story. We still know next to nothing about the Trump assassination attempt. We know little about why the Afghanistan withdrawal was such a fiasco, what the Hunter Biden laptop reveals about massive corruption, why tens of thousands of immigrant children have gone missing, or whether extraterrestrials  are really zipping around the world. Take some of the money you could save on those expensive commentators, hire some real reporters, and start tracking real stories.

Finally, put your country ahead of party. Here’s a case in point: The untold billions of wasted dollars in the federal government might benefit some politicians, but it’s destroying the futures of our grandchildren. Another case: The war by other means tactics of the Communist Chinese government against America is ongoing. So, where’s the reporting? Story after story goes down the rabbit hole of time. Ideally, the press is a check on government abuse and lies. Start doing your job.   

A final note: No thinking person believes that the news can ever be totally objective.       

But you can at least try to be fair.